Saturday, 3 November 2012

Some interesting news about books was published recently,
but from an unexpected source. In the United Kingdom there’s a popular chain of
budget hotels known as Travelodge, and they recently issued a report which
listed the number of books which had been left behind in their hotel rooms, and
which of these novels – which had clearly so displeased their owners that they
simply discarded them, not even being prepared to carry them out to their cars
– had proved to be the most popular, or rather the most unpopular.

It may
not come as a particular surprise to anyone to learn that the book which came
top, with around 7,000 copies being abandoned, was the erotic bestseller by E L
James, Fifty Shades of Grey, which accounted for almost one in every three
books which had been dumped, Travelodge stating that in all a total of 21,786
books had been recovered from its 36,500 hotel rooms during 2011. It will
probably also not be entirely surprising that the other two books in the
trilogy – Fifty Shades Freed and Fifty Shades Darker – also made
the ‘Books Left Behind’ worstseller list at numbers 4 and 7 respectively. I
haven't read any of these three novels, and so I'm not qualified to comment on
their literary worth, but I do think it's significant that most people I've spoken
to who have read them, or have tried to read them, have dismissed them as
boring rubbish.

But I am
familiar with the work of the late Steig Larsson, whose three novels have also
featured prominently in this list, and again their inclusion does not come as
any kind of a surprise to me, because I thought the books were really very
average indeed. In fact, I couldn't even be bothered to finish the last one in
the series. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins also proved to be
unpopular, as did her other two books. But as well as this collection of
entirely forgettable novels, there were also some surprises, including The
Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry and John le Carre's classic Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

The full
and unexpurgated list is as follows:

1. Fifty
Shades of Grey E.L.
James

2. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Stieg
Larsson

3. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest Stieg Larsson

4. Fifty Shades Freed E.L.
James

5. The Hunger Games Suzanne
Collins

6. The Girl Who Played With Fire Stieg
Larsson

7. Fifty Shades Darker E.L.
James

8. Catching Fire Suzanne
Collins

9. Mockingjay Suzanne
Collins

10. The Help Kathryn
Stockett

11. One Day David
Nicholls

12. A Tiny Bit Marvellous Dawn
French

13. Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography Steve Jobs

14. Diary Of A Wimpy Kid Jeff
Kinney

15. The Brightest Star In The Sky Marian
Keyes

16. The Fry Chronicles Stephen
Fry

17. Room Emma
Donoghue

18. StrengthsFinder 2.0 Tom
Rath

19. The Confession John
Grisham

20. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John
Le Carre

There are of course a number of conclusions one can draw
from this report. It could be argued that the abandoned books are an accurate
reflection of the changing reading habits of the British public, and a
spokeswoman for Travelodge confirmed that they had noted a change in the types
of books. Previously, the majority of dumped books were either celebrity
biographies or chick lit, both of which categories had clearly failed to live
up to the low expectations of their purchasers. So, in 2007 the most abandoned
book was The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell, which reportedly failed
to satisfy on any number of levels, while the following year it was Piers
Morgan's equally unimpressive Don't You Know Who I Am? In 2009, the book
most commonly tossed aside by Travelodge customers was Katie Price's
autobiography Pushed to the Limit, which presumably she paid somebody to
write for her, just like all her other books: at least E L James actually wrote
what she put her name to.

Perhaps inevitably, ‘unusual’ reading material was
discovered at several hotels in the chain, including a bag of Kama Sutra books
found in a room previously occupied by an elderly couple in Scarborough, and in
Peterborough a company CEO left behind a suitcase filled with comics.

And I really don’t quite know what to make of that!

Finally, and nothing to do with the topic of this
post, I will not be posting anything else until January 2013, assuming that the
world doesn’t end on 21 December 2012, as some people are claiming the Mayans
predicted, because we will be travelling and also taking a cruise. I’m a guest
lecturer on the Fred Olsen ship Boudicca,
sailing from Portsmouth on 18 November on a round trip to the Caribbean.

Friday, 26 October 2012

Almost every time you open up a newspaper or magazine
aimed at writers, agents or publishers, the topic which is sure to dominate is
the rise of electronic publishing, normally backed up by figures which are
either reassuring or alarming, depending upon exactly where you stand and which
part of the market is likely to affect you.

One of the problems with reports of any kind is
deciding how accurate the figures actually are, and in the case of book sales,
with the huge variety of outlets and discounts and methods of purchasing, it is
very difficult, perhaps impossible, to sort out exactly what is going on.
Typical of this is a recent report by the Association of American Publishers
and the Book Industry Study Group, which came up with the following data about
publishing in the United States:

·Book publishing revenue fell by 2.5% in 2011,
with total sales of $27.2 billion

·In contrast, the total number of books sold rose
by just under 3.5%, to 2.77 billion books, the implication being that lower
revenue on increased sales was caused by people buying more lower-priced ebooks

·388 million ebooks were sold in 2011, an
increase of 210% over 2010, and ebook revenue doubled to $2.074 billion

·Most books are still sold through physical
shops, but in 2011 sales declined by just over 12.5% to $8.59 billion, a loss
primarily blamed on the closure of over 500 Borders’ book stores

·Online retail sales grew by 35% to $5.04
billion, this figure representing approximately 18% of total book revenue, and the biggest
growing sector of the market was for books aimed at children and young adults,
which saw a rise in revenue of 12%

In contrast, another recent report stated that in the
last quarter of 2011, almost 30% of all book sales in the fiction category were
ebooks, and 16% of all non-fiction sales as well, showing a marked increase
over the same period in the previous year, when the respective percentages were
12% and 5%. These represent gains of approximately 250% and 300% respectively
in these two categories, which proves – as if anybody still had any doubts
about the reality of the situation – that ebooks are here to stay. Sales of
juvenile ebook fiction tripled last year as well. The report concluded with a
forecast that similar growth figures to these would probably be recorded over
the next couple of years, after which growth in ebook sales would be likely to
taper off slightly, but would still be very significant.

A
corresponding report, but looking at physical book sales, and drawing its data
primarily from Nielsen Bookscan, stated that print sales were down
significantly, with mass-market paperbacks selling over 25% less than last
year, paperbacks 12% down and with hardcover books the least affected and
showing a reduction sales of about 9%. Perhaps predictably, there was almost no
reduction in sales of books intended for toddlers and very young children.

The twin leaders
of the ebook revolution are of course Amazon, both the world’s biggest online
bookstore and the world’s largest electronic retailer, and the hugely
successful Kindle ereader. However, not everything in Amazon’s garden is rosy.
The company has seen a jump in sales this year, reporting gross revenue up by
29% to $12.8 billion dollars in the second quarter, and a hike in the share
price on Wall Street to $223. The other side of the coin is that profits
decreased by a massive 96% in the second quarter of 2012 compared to the
previous year, and the company’s profit was a mere $7 million, a remarkably
small amount of money considering the gross revenue.

One
reason for the greatly reduced profits is, oddly enough, the Kindle, but the
Kindle Fire, which is selling in much smaller numbers than had been expected. I’ve
mentioned this device before in this blog, and I’m by no means convinced that
it’s a good idea, mainly because of the enormously reduced battery life it has
– Amazon is only claiming about 11 hours, which probably means 8 or 9 would be more
realistic – compared to the original Kindle, which you can use for weeks at a
time without recharging it. The culprit, of course, is also the selling point:
the colour screen which requires a constant power feed. And by launching the
Kindle Fire, Amazon has to some extent stepped outside of its comfort zone and
entered a world already occupied by tablet computers of one sort or another, a
world dominated – for reasons I have yet to understand – by the grossly
overpriced and barely adequate iPad.

It
remains to be seen if Amazon can exert the same level of dominance in this
market as it has achieved in the world of electronic books and online retailing.

Friday, 19 October 2012

One of the blogs I read had an entry a short while ago
about banning books in America. In fact, it was referring to an annual
programme called Banned Books Week, intended to call attention to threats to
the First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution, a programme which has
been running for 30 years. Believe it or not, books still get banned in
America, about 400 incidents being reported in the last year, and the programme
is trying to get Americans to support the idea that all books, regardless of
content, should be disseminated.

This
banning is not the work of the government – unlike certain books published in
Britain which have incurred official displeasure and been forcibly removed from
the shelves, everything from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Spycatcher
– but imposed by libraries and bookstores. Two of the most surprising, or
perhaps predictable, depending on your point of view, classic novels to suffer
this fate in America this year were To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher
in the Rye, but in the past a huge number of other volumes have been banned
in the States and elsewhere. These range from incomprehensible choices like Black
Beauty and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the virtually
unreadable Ulysses and almost equally unreadable The da Vinci Code.

All of
which raises the obvious question: how free is free speech? Are there some
books which are so bad, for whatever reason, that it is better for the public
not to be able to see the text under any circumstances? Perhaps it would be
better to look at the matter from the other side, as it were. What kind of
damage would be caused to a reader’s psyche or moral outlook if they were
exposed to, for example, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone? And,
yes, it was banned. Are they immediately going to race out and buy magic wands
and learn the words of various spells? And if they do, does that really matter?

The
argument against that book was that it promoted witchcraft. Well, I read it,
and it didn’t seem to me that it was doing that: I just thought it was a good
story. But even if that was what somebody read into it, was that necessarily a
bad thing? It’s perfectly possible to argue that every religion in the world is
simply a form of superstition, because by definition it is impossible to prove
a single fact about what is claimed by its adherents to be the truth. In this
respect, witchcraft is no less viable a religious concept than Christianity, so
why shouldn’t it be promoted?

So should
there be limits at all? Should a book which promotes the idea of murdering
police officers be banned? Or one that espouses paedophilia, or racial hatred,
or serial killing?

The
reality, of course, is that today, with the rise of the electronic book and the
Internet, it is effectively impossible to ban anything. Anyone, no matter what
their agenda, can publish whatever they like. On the Internet, you can read the
kind of books that no commercial publisher would ever consider publishing, in even
their wildest and most deranged of dreams.

Until
about two months ago, I would have happily stood up in any forum and defended
the right of any author to write whatever book he or she wanted, no matter what
its contents, and no matter who would be offended by it. I genuinely believed
that the right to free speech transcends all other issues. And, in fact, I
still believe this to be the case with regard to novels.

And then
I had the misfortune to read a book by a man named Ken Ham called The Great
Dinosaur Mystery Solved, and my views concerning non-fiction books changed
almost overnight. This book, without the slightest shadow of doubt, deserves to
be banned, simply because some people who read it might actually believe that
there is some truth in the collection of rabid nonsense he has produced as a
theory. Basically, this man believes that dinosaurs didn’t live over 65 million
years ago but a mere 6000 years ago, despite the utterly overwhelming and
completely undisputed scientific evidence to the contrary, evidence from almost
every scientific discipline from geology to meteorology, as well as palaeontology.

He’s promoting creationism, obviously, which as a
theory is just as valid as my own personal ‘Theory that Fairies live at the
bottom of my Garden’, and makes no sense whatsoever. Everybody, of course, is
entitled to their own point of view, but I firmly believe that a book
purporting to be non-fiction should at least fulfil certain basic criteria, the
most obvious of which is that it should be based on fact. If he was writing a
novel, it wouldn’t bother me, but this man is advancing this as a serious
proposition, and to me that seems very dangerous.

In fact,
this isn’t a book that should be banned. This really is a book that should be
burnt.

Friday, 12 October 2012

Yesterday Simon & Schuster published my latest book – The Ripper Secret – and the initial
marketing push looks as if it’s been quite successful, with the novel being
available in all the major supermarket chains and the high street retailers. As
well as the usual kinds of promotions, the publishing house is also
broadcasting a podcast I recorded on its website and featuring a short article
I wrote about Victorian detection methods in the ‘Dark Pages’ section.

It looks
as if the timing has been quite providential as well, with the second of a
two-part BBC documentary being broadcast last night, the same day as the book’s
publication, and with the level of interest in this most notorious of all
serial killers still being remarkably high. When I input the search term ‘Jack
the Ripper’ into Amazon, it came up with just under 3,400 items, an astonishing
number of books and films bearing in mind that his killing spree took place
almost a century and a half ago. Doing the same thing on Google produced almost
ten million hits.

The BBC
documentary was interesting, though the conclusions it came to were somewhat
predictable and – like a lot of the things the BBC produces – very selective. Their
principal suspects were Montague John Druitt and a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski,
though no believable evidence was advanced to indicate that either man could
have been Jack the Ripper. And it’s worth pointing out that in all over 200 different
suspects have been suggested over the years, and some 30 of these have been
seriously considered, ranging from the sublime (Prince Albert Victor with or
without the assistance of Queen Victoria’s Physician-In-Ordinary Sir William
Gull) to the ridiculous (‘Jill the Ripper’ or the ‘mad midwife’).

The documentary
also provided reconstructions of some of the events, and these were not always
as accurate as they certainly should have been. For example, when Israel
Schwartz witnessed an altercation between a man and a woman who might have been
Elizabeth Stride, he also described another man on the opposite side of the
street, a man who then began following him. In the BBC’s version, this man didn’t
appear at all, and the scene showed Schwartz passing very close by the arguing
couple and getting an excellent look at the man involved, which certainly wasn’t
the case according to his testimony.

They also
were highly selective when considering the medical evidence. With a single
exception, every doctor who examined any of the victims of the Ripper concluded
that the killer had to have had at least some medical knowledge. The single
exception was Dr Thomas Bond, who stated that he didn’t believe the murderer
had any surgical ability, but conspicuously failed to explain how the Ripper
had managed to remove Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney without damaging any of
the surrounding organs in complete darkness in Mitre Square in under 15 minutes,
a difficult and complex surgical procedure even on a corpse.

With
regard to the killing of Annie Chapman, the divisional police surgeon Dr George
Bagster Phillips stated that if he had performed the mutilations to her body,
even in the well-lit and ordered surroundings of an operating theatre, the
procedure would have taken him at least an hour. His views were echoed by the
other doctors involved in examining the victims.

Probably
unsurprisingly, the BBC ignored all the evidence recorded by every other doctor
at the time, and simply took Bond’s statement as gospel, claiming that the
killings showed no medical knowledge or ability whatsoever, presumably so that
they could offer Druitt and Kosminski – neither of whom had medical training –
as believable suspects.

Personally,
I believe that it is undeniable the Jack the Ripper – whoever he was – at the
very least had some medical and surgical training, and that of course would
narrow the field of suspects very considerably and also, incidentally,
eliminate at a stroke the most popular contenders.

The man
who was Jack the Ripper in my novel, on the other hand, is a far better fit
than most. Records from this period are notoriously patchy and incomplete, but
there is evidence to suggest that this man was living in London at the time of
the killings, had trained and then worked as a surgeon, and had a history of
violence against women, with quite probably at least one murder behind him
before he arrived in the city. He is also one of the least known of all the
Ripper suspects.

The Ripper Secret is of course a novel,
but the story is tightly woven around the killings which are described as
accurately as possible after such a passage of time. I’ve taken considerable
care to make sure that the facts are right, and in my opinion the story does
work as a possible explanation for the murders. In particular, it provides logical
answers to six questions which almost no non-fiction writer has ever managed resolved
satisfactorily:

·Why did the murders start?

·Why did the mutilations get progressively more
severe?

·Why were there two murders on one night?

·Why did the murders stop?

·Why did Sir Charles Warren resign simultaneously
with the final killing?

·What was the significance of the geographical locations
of the murders?

Friday, 5 October 2012

Obviously I’m not the first person to make a statement
like the title of this blog post, but a recent article in another blog site
caught my eye and emphasised very clearly just how little money most authors of
ebooks actually make as a result of all their hard work.

The article
referred to a report by Bowker which stated that the average price of
commercially published ebooks in the United States fell by about 8% from 2010
to 2011, for fiction from around $5.69 to $5.24, with non-fiction dropping even
more dramatically from over $9 per book down to around $6.47, a drop of about
25% in price. It’s worth mentioning that non-fiction ebooks were still costing
about 20% more than novels in 2011, but the year before the price difference
was 65%, so the gap between the two types of book is narrowing, and it’s also
clear that prices across all genres are falling steadily.

And it’s
worth emphasising that these prices are for commercially-produced ebooks, not
self-published novels, which are typically selling for substantially lower
prices, often between 50 pence and £2.99 (roughly 75 cents to $4.50).

In fact,
the blog article pointed out, some ebooks are selling for less than the cost of
a monthly magazine, and it suggested that one reason for the uncertain state of
the world of publishing was not a lack of good books and decent writers, but
simply the huge reduction in profits because ebooks are now so cheap. And all
this at a time when hardback coffee-table books are surging in price, some now
costing around £50/$75 each.

Perhaps the
most dramatic figure the article came up with was that the ebook price of an
average novel of about 100,000 words meant that the author was actually earning
about 1 cent for every 200 words written, and that the only recourse for the
publishing industry was to immediately and dramatically increase the price
charged for every ebook they sell.

Most of
which I completely disagree with, because he’s missing several important
points. In fact, I think most people in the industry are missing these same
points.

There is
a fundamental difference between an electronic book and a physical book which
reports of this kind consistently fail to acknowledge. To produce a hardback or
paperback novel requires a conspicuous consumption of resources – paper, card,
ink and so on – plus warehouse space to store it, and the inevitable transport
costs to distribute it, all overlaid by the staff costs at the publishing house
and the company used for typesetting and printing. For a typical novel with a first
print run of around 25,000 copies, the total cost is likely to be well in
excess of £20,000/$30,000. The royalty paid to the author will be around 7% of
the selling price – not the cover price – of the book.

To produce an electronic book, once the manuscript
has been prepared, costs almost nothing – certainly well under £500/$750 even
if a professional cover is designed – and the finished product can be sold as
often and as quickly as the market demands. The author’s royalty will be around
20% of the selling price from a commercial publisher, or 40% or 70% if the book
is self-published. Although the content of the two items is identical in terms
of the text, in all other respects they are entirely different in every way. Trying
to compare one with the other is pointless.

You cannot
assess the earnings of any author on the basis of revenue received per words
written. This only works for short stories and magazine articles where the
writer is paid a flat sum for his contribution, irrespective of the subsequent
sales of the publication. In fact, there’s a very valid argument that ebooks
are still far too expensive – not far too cheap – simply because each sale costs
the publisher virtually nothing and the reading public knows that.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I genuinely believe
that the market will only really take off when the price of a commercially
produced ebook drops to the level at which it becomes a genuine impulse purchase,
and I normally assess that as the cost of a cup of coffee – certainly under
£3/$4.50 – and ideally less than that.

There’s
an old story concerning the invention of the ballpoint pen, which I believe to
be true. An English company began marketing the pen at the highest possible
price they thought the market could bear, and about the same time an American
company started selling the new pen as cheaply as they possibly could. The English
company went bankrupt, and the success of the American firm is reflected in the
fact that almost everybody these days calls a ballpoint pen a ‘biro’, in most
cases without having the slightest idea where the name came from.

I believe
that the most successful publishers of ebooks will be those companies which
embrace the ‘pile them high and sell them cheap’ marketing concept which has
worked so consistently in the past, and those that go to the wall will be the
ones who cling onto old concepts of the value of the written word.

Friday, 28 September 2012

You’ll be relieved to hear that this week I’m not going to
be banging on about the parlous state of publishing and the uncertainties for
the future of the industry of which I am a very small part. You might be less
relieved to learn that I’m going to spend my time telling you about my latest
book.

The Ripper Secret is my second book for
Simon & Schuster and is, like the previous novel The Titanic Secret, set around a series of real-world events, in
this case the brutal killings perpetrated in the Whitechapel area of London at
the end of the nineteenth century by an unknown murderer who acquired the hideously
appropriate nickname ‘Jack the Ripper’. What I’ve always found interesting
about this particular serial killer – he almost certainly wasn’t the first man
who met this definition by embarking on a killing spree over a period of time,
but he’s definitely the most famous – is that even today, almost a century and
a half after the events which cast a cloak of terror over the East End of London,
his actions still throw a shadow over the city.

People still
travel to Whitechapel and the surrounding areas, looking for the streets where
the Ripper walked in search of his victims, and organized tours of the murder
sites – or rather what remain of the geographical locations because development
in this part of London has hidden almost all of the sites under new roads and
buildings – are still a popular tourist attraction.

And not only that, but almost every year a new non-fiction
book is published which positively identifies yet another new subject as Jack
the Ripper. The one characteristic most of these books seem to share is that
the author has a very clear idea of exactly who the Ripper was, and then spends
almost the entire book cherry-picking those pieces of evidence which support
this contention, ignoring those which flatly contradict it and, in some cases,
invent ‘facts’ from dubious sources to reinforce his or her argument. Very few
books even attempt to carry out a proper and unbiased investigation of the
Ripper killings and then come to a reasonable conclusion about the identity of
the perpetrator.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my novel does neither, precisely
because it is a novel. I am not attempting
in this book to provide compelling evidence that my chosen subject was Jack the Ripper, although
suggestions have been made in the past that he could have been. Nor am I trying
to be selective in choosing which facts will be a part the story. Instead, I’ve
tried to weave a believable plot around the Ripper killings, while sticking as
rigidly as possible to the historical reality of that dark time in east London.

While I was researching the historical background of
this book, a number of questions occurred to me, questions which very few
people writing on the subject have ever attempted to answer. Most books have
attempted simply to identify the murderer and little else.

In particular, few people ever seemed to have
considered the following:

·Why did the killings start?

·Why did the mutilations get progressively more
brutal with each succeeding murder?

·Why did the killings stop?

·And what possible motive was driving the
murderer?

I don’t pretend that my novel actually identifies the
real Jack the Ripper, but what it does do is provide logical and believable
answers to those questions.

As to the actual identity of this most notorious of
all serial killers, I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about that.

The Ripper
Secret will be published by Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom on
11 October 2012.

Friday, 21 September 2012

There’s been one interesting development reported in the
press recently which again serves to underline the widening gap between
conventional – paperback and hardback – publication and electronic media. According
to USA Today, the bestselling American
author Tess Gerritsen released a mini e-book in advance of her new novel,
published in August. The ‘teaser’ e-book, for want of a better expression, sold
for only $1.99, making it a true impulse purchase, and was clearly intended to
both appeal to her large existing readership so that they would have something
else to read ahead of the publication of her novel, and also provide a cheap
e-book that would allow people who’d never read a Gerritsen book to sample her
writing and see if they liked it.

The
beauty of this kind of exercise, of course, is that the time taken between an
author or publisher deciding that a novella or mini e-book is a good idea, to
the finished work being available on Amazon can literally be a matter of a day
or so after the manuscript has been completed. Contrast that with the length of
time it would take a conventional publisher to achieve the same thing. Granted,
my first published novel was a fairly weighty tome, well over 100,000 words,
but that was delivered as a finished manuscript to the publisher in May 2003,
and the book was finally released in August 2004, almost a year and a half
later.

The
ability to react quickly and produce a book at short notice is completely
beyond the ability of most publishing houses, and this is in no way their
fault. The extended timescale is forced upon them by the various processes
which are involved in the printing and publication of any book. The only time
publishers do release a book quickly is for works like biographies which are
issued a very short time after the death of the subject. And this can only be
achieved, of course, because the entire manuscript has already been written by
the biographer, and the only things missing are the date and circumstances of
the death of that person

I think
this kind of very reactive approach to publishing, of getting additional
publications out on the streets very quickly, is something we’re going to see a
lot more of in the future, and not just as teasers to bridge the gap between
publication dates of major novels. For example, if a book proved to be
unexpectedly popular, the author could release a short work explaining how he
got the idea for the book, the time it took to write it, and other material of
that nature. A controversial work could be followed by a kind of expanded
author’s note, detailing the sources for the published information and the
reason the writer and publisher felt it was important to place the material in
the public domain.

In short,
I believe this very flexible approach to publication could actually start a
whole new trend, and it could only be achieved because of the existence of the
Kindle and other electronic readers.

But the corollary
of this new development, obviously, will be the widening of the existing gap
between readers who like books and readers who like to read books on an
electronic device. As well as the obvious and well publicised advantages of the
Kindle and its electronic kin, this new aspect to publishing might serve to
drive more people towards making the jump to an e-reader of some sort, with a
consequent knock-on effect in the sales of conventional books. And, of course, that
will be another blow that both publishers and bookshops will have to absorb.

And there’s
another possibility as well, a possibility that actually takes publishing
around in something of a full circle. Perhaps authors could consider releasing
their books in serial format, selling them cheaply as electronic downloads in
tranches of three or four chapters at a time, which would allow new readers of
their books to sample their storytelling ability at almost no cost. And, quite
probably, even if the serialised sections were very modestly priced, the cost
of the complete work could be far more than most books are selling for today as
Kindle downloads.

If this happens, it really would be a return to the
good old days, because authors such as Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
released many of their books in this way as a matter of course, publishing
their novels in serial form in popular newspapers of the day.

Perhaps in
publishing, as in so many other fields, there really is nothing new under the
sun …

Friday, 14 September 2012

There’s been both good news and bad news in the world of
publishing in America just recently, your perception of the various reports
being coloured significantly by exactly where you stand.

According
to Publishers Weekly, and their report was based on sales data supplied by Bowker
Market Research, Amazon further extended its considerable lead in the book
marketplace over the past twelve months, and today almost a third – 29% in fact
– of all money spent on books passes through the tills at Amazon. That’s
a big jump from the figure quoted last year, of 23%.

Some other
retailers are also improving their figures, though not by much. Barnes &
Noble – still the world’s largest bookseller with both online and High Street
retailers – managed a 1% shift – hardly a jump – from a 19% to 20% share of the
market, and other online retailers, excluding both Amazon and Barnes &
Noble, together accounted for roughly 10% of all spending on books by
consumers. Adding the various sets of data together produces the unsurprising conclusion
that well over half of all consumer spending on books is today done online.

Independent
bookstores are continuing to be less and less significant, this year holding
only 6% of the marketplace, a fall of a third from their 9% share of a year
earlier. Coming in at fourth in the sales figures are three separate outlets:
the supermarket giant Wal-Mart, book clubs and Christian outlets, each holding about
4% of the market. Apart from Wal-Mart, American supermarkets only account for
1% of all book sales, a significantly lower percentage than in Britain, where
the fiction buyer for Asda can literally decide whether or not a particular
book will make it into the bestseller charts, based solely on his or her
decision about whether or not Asda will stock it.

The only
other significant sales reported were the warehouse clubs which sold 3% of books,
and Books-A-Million, the second largest American bookstore chain, which
accounted for a mere 2% of all book sales.

If I was
investing money in any American bookstore chain apart from Amazon and Barnes
& Noble, I’d be worried. Remember that last year Borders accounted for
roughly 10% of all book sales in Britain, and today the stores are shuttered
and barred.

Perhaps surprisingly,
the study also showed that sales of ebooks only accounted for about 10% of all
book revenue, and that women were responsible for 64% of all spending on ebooks.
The demographic analysis was interesting as well, showing that the highest percentage
of ebook purchases came from people in the 18-29 age range (31%), with the
30-44 year old buyers very close behind with 28%. The younger teens, in the 13-17
age range, only bought 5% of ebooks, so presumably the ‘Harry Potter effect’
has now started to die away.

There was
a slightly different poll conducted in a recent edition of USA Today, which asked readers how they obtained their most recent
book. Less than half of those who responded (48%) said that they had bought it.
Almost a quarter of them (24%) had borrowed it from either a friend or family
member, and a further 14% had borrowed it from a library.

A somewhat surprising 13% ticked the ‘other’ box,
which could mean that they found it, stole it – though most people wouldn’t
consider books to be high value or desirable items in the eyes of most thieves
– received it as a gift or obtained it from some kind of communal resource,
like the paperback cupboard in a clubhouse. Those people reading electronic
versions, of course, could well have downloaded the book for free from Amazon,
either because the book was offered as a loss leader to advertise that
particular author’s other works, or as a kind of free promotion ahead of the
book going on sale at normal price.

But whatever the reason, the one fact that shone out
very clearly from that particular survey was that less than half of those
readers who answered had actually paid money for their current choice of
literature, and that really cannot be good news for anybody involved in
publishing, at any level or in any position.

Friday, 7 September 2012

It’s not really my fault, but the future of publishing is
what most people in the industry seem to be talking about at the moment, when
they’re not wishing they’d written Fifty
Shades instead of EL James and were banking the better part of a million
pounds every week. And that’s not a misprint.

Instead of
looking at new books and what authors are up to at the moment – the two core
components of the industry – most of the comments I’ve seen lately are still
far more concerned with the industry as a whole: what does the future hold for
agents, publishers and especially for bookshops? The general consensus seems to
be that independent bookshops will probably survive, albeit in much smaller
numbers than at present, and in order to attract and retain their customers
they will have to offer far more to them than just a bunch of books sitting on
shelves. They’ll have to do the kind of things that Amazon simply can’t compete
with, like offering coffee and cakes and comfy seats while people browse,
organizing book signings, author visits and book readings.

And talking
about Amazon, the literal ‘elephant in the room’, there will undoubtedly be
competition in the future for the bookselling giant, and especially for its
single bestselling item, the Kindle. And it looks like the most serious
competition to this device will come from the Nook, produced by Barnes &
Noble, and especially given the fact that Microsoft has taken a stake in the
company, which means that Barnes & Noble now has both serious money and technological
know-how behind it.

Which seems
like an appropriate moment to mention Amazon’s latest electronic product, the
Kindle Fire. I’ve yet to handle one of these devices or even see it in the
flesh, but I have to say that I’m not entirely convinced it’s going to enjoy
anything like the runaway success of the Kindle itself.

The beauty
of the Kindle is that it quite literally provides a library in your pocket.
With a capacity of up to 3,500 books, a battery that needs charging only once
every three or four weeks, and the ability to download new books wirelessly
almost everywhere, it’s very difficult to see why anybody who enjoys reading
doesn’t own one. It even makes good financial sense, because of the huge number
of ebooks available for free or for under about £3, in contrast to the typical
RRP of a paperback novel of around £6.99.

But the
Kindle Fire is a very different animal. The most obvious difference is the
colour screen on the Fire, and the fact that this device is far more than just
a way of reading books. It’s essentially a tablet computer – a long way from
being my favourite device – with a seven inch screen that also allows the user
to play music, watch films, read colour magazines and a bunch of other things.
All of which does, in my opinion, beg the question: why would you want to? Do
you really want to sit down and watch a movie on a seven inch screen wearing
earphones?

OK,
probably some people do. On trains I quite often see people hunched over mobile
phones squinting at the tiny screen while some action sequence is displayed on
it, to the accompaniment of tinny music leaking from their earphones. God knows
what that does to your eyes after a while, but I suppose for these people the
jump to the Fire’s much larger screen would be huge improvement. But it will of
course mean that they would have to carry both a mobile phone and the Fire.

On the
pricing side, it’s not a bad deal, especially when compared to the ludicrously
expensive iPad, with the 32GB Fire coming in at only £199, about half the price
of the entry-level iPad, and doing pretty much the same things in a far more convenient package.

But I
think the biggest problem with the Fire is going to be the battery life. Amazon
is claiming that the battery will last for 11 hours. For anybody familiar with
claims made by computer companies, that number will be taken with a very large
pinch of salt, and probably a more realistic estimate would be 8 to 9 hours,
depending on usage. And that, no matter how you much you dress it up, is simply
pathetic when compared to the original Kindle.

So if you
are thinking about buying one of the new devices principally to read books, don’t
bother. Get the old-style one, and you won’t regret it for a moment. But if you
really are the kind of person who wants to sit by yourself in a corner
somewhere, watching a film on a screen you can cover with the palm of your
hand, without a doubt the Fire will be a far better buy for you than the iPad.

Wednesday, 5 September 2012

There's a lot of debate online at the moment re the sock puppet attacks - sounds like a great name for a band...

I'm not going to say what's already been said but I would say that this would be Amazon's best opportunity to do what I've always hoped they would and completely scrap the star rating system. Writers, readers and publishers have all become completely obsessed by it and it would certainly be one less headache for all concerned.

I think book reviews are still very necessary and, as there are many passionate book bloggers out there who work hard to bring their constructive opinions to other readers via their sites this would be an excellent way for shoppers to find out more about a potential purchase if they needed further convincing.

Perhaps Amazon could link up to some of the established, rated sites in the way that bloggers will put a link to a book's Amazon page. Bloggers could submit their sites to Amazon and when you visit a book's page Amazon could give you a links to several of the sites featuring differing reviews of the book.

Perhaps this would be unworkable but there must be an alternative to a system that no longer fulfills its initially straightforward purpose.

Friday, 31 August 2012

I know we keep on returning to the same subject, but for
that I make no apology. Anybody involved in any way in the world of publishing
will be aware that the industry is in a state of flux, with nobody quite
knowing what’s going to happen next. The two factors driving that uncertainty
are the global recession, which is clearly having an impact upon every industry
in the world and upon what people spend their money on, and the almost
simultaneous introduction of the Kindle and other ebook readers.

There was
an interesting short editorial in the summer 2012 edition of The Author, which described the current
situation in quite a concise and effective way, and I’m repeating some of his opinions in this blog posting. The author made the point that ebooks are neither
a promise for the future, nor a potential new technology: they are already a
very substantial part of the publishing spectrum. However, according to some of
the latest figures, sales of ebooks appear to be levelling off, but absolutely
nobody in the publishing business believes that the figures will decline, or
that either the ebook or the ebook reader will prove to be a short term fad. No
doubt in the future readers of various different types will appear, some with
colour screens like the Kindle Fire, but the electronic reader as a technology
and a device is here to stay.

Figures also
indicate that the main appeal of the ebook is to the dedicated fiction buyer,
which is perhaps not surprising. I’ve mentioned before that in my opinion the
novel is a disposable item, something which is read once and then given away,
and for that kind of usage the Kindle is absolutely ideal. The reader can
download the book instantly, almost irrespective of where in the world he or
she may be sitting, read it and then remove it from the device, secure in the
knowledge that the ebook is securely stored in Amazon’s archive and can be
retrieved at any time, and at no further cost.

Following
on from this, it’s also becoming clear that ebook sales are supplanting rather
than supplementing the sales of printed books, and most especially the sales of
paperbacks, which given the foregoing is entirely predictable. What is perhaps rather
unexpected is that sales of hardback books appear to be largely unaffected.

Other factors
in the equation include piracy, which is likely to remain a problem. In one
survey over one third of the ebook users questioned admitted that they had
illegally downloaded copyrighted material at some point. There are two ways of
addressing this problem: complicated and simple.

The complicated way is to employ some form of Digital
Rights Management (DRM) to try to ensure that only the person who has paid for
the book is able to download it onto his or her device, and that it cannot
subsequently be copied to another device or uploaded onto the web to be
downloaded from there. The problem with this is that hackers regard such
measures as a challenge, and are quite happy to spend hours, days or even weeks
working out a way to disable the DRM or bypass them. It becomes a kind of
contest which neither side is ever going to win.

The simple way is, really, really simple. When the
price of an ebook, or anything else for that matter, is reduced to the point
where for most people it is insignificant, which normally means about the price
of a cup of coffee, there is almost no incentive for anyone to download a
pirated version when for just a pound or two they can legitimately purchase the
real thing. The problem at the moment is that publishers seem completely unable
to grasp this fact, and almost without exception they are almost all pricing
their ebooks at a similar – and in some cases even a higher – price than the
paperback version.

I’m aware of all the arguments surrounding this
subject, arguments which undeniably have merit, at least to people in the
publishing industry. But they’re not selling ebooks to people in the publishing
industry: they’re selling them to members of the general public. And most book
buyers are very well aware that preparing an ebook and offering it for sale through
Amazon is something that only ever has to be done once. Every subsequent sale
of the ebook costs the publisher precisely nothing, whereas every paperback has
to be printed, bound, stored, transported and finally displayed in a bookshop
window or sent through the post, expenses which clearly have to be paid by
somebody.

The inevitable result of this pricing policy is that
most readers believe that full priced ebooks are at best unreasonably
expensive, and at worst a rip-off, which makes the idea of downloading a pirate
version infinitely more attractive.

I’m not really in the prediction business, otherwise
I would simply win the lottery and retire to the Caribbean, but I’m prepared to
wager money that within a couple of years, five years at the most, the
essential truth of this argument will finally be realized, and publishers will
begin selling ebooks at about the same price point as self-published authors
are doing at the moment. In other words, for less than about £3.

And I’ll
make a further prediction: if they do this, ebook piracy will be enormously reduced,
and the publishers will be selling far more copies than they do at the moment,
and making significantly larger profits.

Finally,
in my probably vain attempt to retire to the Caribbean, could I urge everybody
to take a look at the following website, and buy as many copies of the books
listed there as you can afford!

Friday, 24 August 2012

Just like a thriller shouldn't allow you to draw breath I'm not giving myself any opportunity to allow my pulse to slow between books.

Having today delivered my polishes for my stand alone being published in April I'm straight on to my next thriller, the idea of which has already been given the enthusiastic thumbs up by my editor.

May sound frantic but in fact I've been working up the idea for some time and, now the decks are (momentarily) cleared, I can concentrate on getting some words down. I'm sure I'll still have to read next year's book a few more times before it's signed off but I'm looking forward to spending some hours with a new concept and characters.

Probably because us writers spend so much time waiting for feedback and news it's sometimes good to just get on with something new and exciting.

It's daunting to have your cursor flash on that first page again but this time next year I hope I'll be in the same position I am with the last.

Now, I've got the twist... Just need the 100,000 words that lead up to it.

Matt Lynn and I have talked on several occasions about
writing, which shouldn’t come as very much of a surprise, because we’re both
full-time authors and authors, like people involved in any other trade, usually
taken a keen interest in how other people approach their work. In our
respective cases, we’re entirely different. Matt has the patience and the
ability to work out an enormously detailed synopsis for each book, a synopsis
that might approach one third of the length of the finished manuscript, and
then he basically writes the book exactly following that synopsis.

One of
the things I like least about writing is doing a synopsis, even a one-page
effort, and I simply wouldn’t have the patience to work the way he does. I tend
to start with an idea and a blank page in Word. I think of a decent opening
sentence – or I try to – and then go on from there. I always know more or less how
the book is going to end, but I very rarely have any idea of the twists and
turns which the plot will take during the writing, and for me this system
works. Neither of us is right or wrong. Like all authors we work the way that
seems to suit us best.

But
occasionally I do stop and wonder if some form of specialist software might
help me to organize my thoughts rather better than simply trying to keep the
entire plot and all the characters tucked away in various compartments of my unreliable
brain. Hence my decision a short time ago to try Storybook Pro. I played around
with the free version for a short time and then decided to buy the ‘Pro’
version and see how that worked.

On the
face of it, this should be a remarkably useful program for any writer, offering
the ability to create major and minor characters, describe locations and all
the rest of it, inspect the timeline and use various charts and other tools. In
reality, and in use, it’s precisely the opposite. The program is non-intuitive
in many respects, and the parameters are so rigid that it actually acts as a
dampener on creativity. I doubt if any working author had any input into the
design of the program at any stage.

For example, in most of my books I begin with a
prologue, normally set many years, sometimes many centuries, before the action
which takes place in the present day. This program simply won’t let me do that,
because it insists on a precise date for each section, and it also won’t allow
me to call the first chapter ‘Prologue’. In fact, I did eventually find a way
around this, but it took me the better part of half an hour to do so. The
dating system is particularly rigid. You either had to insert a specific date
or what it calls ‘relative dating’, where a particular section occurs a number
of days after the previous one. It’s so much easier in Word to just type the
date I want – rather than the date the program wants – at the head of the
chapter.

As well as chapters, there are also ‘strands’ and
‘parts’, neither of which seem to be particularly useful for any purpose I
could discern. The program is also irritating in that various icons on the
screen don’t do anything – for example, at the beginning of each chapter is
either the word ‘draft’ or ‘outline’, each followed by a different icon which logically
you would expect to allow you to switch views. They don’t. Neither the name nor
the icon does anything at all, which makes you wonder why it’s there in the
first place.

Other niggles with it are that it’s incredibly slow
to load, so slow, in fact, that usually I end up clicking the icon again, when
it generates an error message telling me that the file is already in use. Word
is a big program, but it loads in less than half the time that Storybook Pro
takes to appear. It’s even clumsy when you leave it. Clicking the close button
doesn’t close the program, but generates a dialogue box which asks you if you
want to close the program. Oddly enough, that was why I clicked the close
button, but the program – or more accurately the programmer – appears to be too
stupid to realize this.

But
perhaps my biggest concern with this program is that shortly after I purchased
version 3.2, the company sent me an e-mail explaining how much better version
4.0 was, and how much less rigid the parameters were, and offering me a
substantial discount off the purchase price of the new program. The idea was
that existing users could input a code during the purchase process, and the
price would then be adjusted accordingly. So I tried this. In fact, I tried it
about a dozen times, and it simply didn’t work. I e-mailed the company. I
actually e-mailed them six times pointing this out and asking if they could fix
it. The last e-mail went off last week, and to date I have had no response
whatsoever to any of my messages.

Bearing in mind that all I was trying to do was
purchase the upgraded version – to send the company money, in fact – the total
lack of response is extremely worrying. If that’s the way they treat potential
customers, I very much doubt if they even have a support staff, and if they
have I suspect that you’d be most unlikely to get any kind of sense out of
them.

Friday, 17 August 2012

First, something of an apology, as real life has been rather
ganging up on me of late. Getting an Internet connection on board a ship is
never an easy thing to achieve and, because the link is provided by a satellite,
the download and upload speed is usually little better than dial-up, which
means there’s no real incentive to spend much time on the Web. So while I was
on board the Queen Mary 2, cruising
from Southampton to Hamburg, and then up to Honningsvaag on the northern tip of
Norway, I just gave lectures and wrote stuff for the next book, and didn’t
bother with much else.

Back on dry land, we’ve had a few problems as well,
trying to sort out various houses for reasons I won’t bore you with, because
they’re really not very interesting, and then, when I finally got to France and
should have had time to write an entry, I discovered that I had helpfully left
the power cable for my laptop in Andorra, a hot and sweaty six hour drive
south, so I’ve been out of e-mail contact for almost two weeks while I found
one on eBay, using my wife’s netbook, and could get it sent out to my address
here. Anyway, it arrived today, just in time for me to write this, so thank you
to all_mobilecompaccessories2010 for such a prompt and efficient service.

Leigh Russell
has already touched on this topic in her contribution to this blog, but I
thought I’d expand on it somewhat.

About a
week ago, to coincide with the second anniversary of the launch of the Kindle
in the United Kingdom, Amazon UK announced that it was now selling more ebooks
than paperback and hardback books combined. The figure the company came up with
is that for every 100 printed books sold, Amazon sells 114 ebooks. This statistic
is specific to Amazon in Britain, and does not necessarily reflect the balance
between printed and electronic books bought from any other outlet.

The Kindle
became the bestselling product on Amazon within just a few months of its
launch, and is still selling extremely well, because it’s very good at what it
does, which I’ve mentioned on this blog before. It’s not the only electronic
reader, of course, but it is far and away the most popular. One reason for the
success of these devices is the huge number of sales of novels like Fifty Shades of Grey, some 2 million of
which were apparently sold by Amazon in under four months.

I’ve read
elsewhere that this book is a contender for both the title of ‘fastest selling
novel of all time’ and ‘worst novel of all time’, though because I haven’t read
it – and have no intention of doing so – I’m not qualified to comment on the
latter opinion. One reason for the success of this book and its kin is arguably
the fact that women – and it is aimed squarely at this section of the market –
can read it on the Kindle without anybody knowing that they’re immersed in a
racy and semi-pornographic novel. Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite to
one reason given for the success of The
Da Vinci Code, which was undeniably a dreadful book, and which was supposed
to be popular precisely because it had the words ‘Da Vinci’ on its cover.

Another reason
for the success of the electronic side of Amazon is self-publishing, and the
company states that it has seen a 400% increase in the use of Kindle Direct
Publishing over the past year.

But perhaps one of the most important – and encouraging
– pieces of data released by Amazon is that, according to the company’s figures,
the average Kindle owner buys four times more books than people who only buy
printed versions. I’d agree with that, because it’s certainly true for me.
Precisely because I can buy between three and four cheap Kindle downloads for
the price of one paperback, and have them delivered in a matter of seconds, I
tend to cruise the bestseller lists and buy books in clumps, or whatever the
correct mass noun is for more than one book.

And, because each of them costs less than a cup of
coffee, even if I decide they’re complete rubbish it really doesn’t matter. And
while it’s true that most self-published books have been turned into Kindle
downloads precisely because they’re nowhere near good enough for any commercial
publisher to even consider, most of the ones I have bought are quite readable. I reckon
that out of every 10 Kindle books I buy, one or two will be unreadably bad, one
will probably be of publishable standard, and the rest will fall somewhere
between these two extremes.

So although the publishing world is in something of a
crisis at the moment, not really knowing what to do for the best and how to
cope with the rise of the ebook, we can at least take comfort in the fact that
the future of reading looks as bright as it ever did, even if the medium which
is used to display the type on the page has changed dramatically.

Thursday, 9 August 2012

Am now in receipt of SCARE ME edit notes from Exhibit A and I'm relieved they don't do what the title says.

When I edit I always try to be as objective about my own work as possible and the best way I've found to achieve this is to pretend it's somebody else's. It's been a while since I read the whole manuscript so this will certainly help the approach.

A bit of time away from your project does help you to see areas that can be enhanced. There's always room for improvement and adding those finer details is like adding a final dash of spice to a dish.

Whether or not readers will happily digest what I've prepared for them is an entirely different matter but now the book title and publishing date have been added to the new Exhibit A website it all seems so much more official and I realise the day of publication is drawing nearer.

Advance review copies should be doing the rounds by the end of the year and it will be in the hands of paperback and Kindle readers by April.

So I really should get on with these final polishes. 27th of August is my deadline. Olympics? Barbecues? Cold beers? What do I need those for when I have bloody murder and mayhem for company?

Monday, 6 August 2012

In the light of recent news about e-books on amazon can anyone tell me why Waterstones is complicit in the disappearance of the printed book? While Amazon report that sales of ebooks (excluding free downloads) now outstrip combined sales of paperbacks and hardbacks 114 to 100, Waterstones have introduced a counterproductive events policy.
Nothing is ever achieved by being defeatist. Trends are not inevitable.
With passion, hard work, and some common sense, the printed book can survive alongside its electronic partner - yes, partner, not competitor. Why not, when ebooks are attracting more people to read?
Waterstones have a responsibility to readers and authors who want to see them come out fighting in defense of physical books. There is no one else who can do this on a significant scale (with no disrespect intended to the fantastic dedicated smaller chains and independent bookshops).
Read about "Waterstones Faulty Logic" on Book2Book (booktrade.info site)http://www.booktrade.info/index.php/showarticle/42274/nl

But I would hate to see printed books disappear. If you agree, please join in the debate. Visit your local bookshop to discuss what is happening. Post online, join in debates taking place on my blog and others, on my facebook page, and twitter.
Don't wake up one morning and express surprise that Waterstones have gone.
Think about Ottakars, Dillons, and others, recently taken over by Waterstones. Then think about Borders, more recently morphed into stores like Primark. Then think.

Our Mission

The Curzon Group is dedicated to taking the ideas, imagination and energy of thriller writers ranging from John Buchan to Eric Ambler, Hammond Innes to Ian Fleming, and Alistair MacLean to Len Deighton, and reviving them for the 21st Century.

“The tradition of thriller writing should never be allowed to die,” said Jeffrey Archer, when he advised us on the launch of this group. “Not least because we are better at it than anyone else in the world.”

About Us

The Curzon Group is a band of eight thriller writers who get together to have lunch, swap ideas, and come up with wheezes for promoting our books. Matt Lynn, Richard Jay Parker and Leigh Russell can all be found blogging here.

Get The Newsletter

For regular updates from The Curzon Group, and for news of our latest books, just send your e-mail to thecurzongroup@gmail.com.